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People in Toronto want so many good things but publicly howl when they’re asked to pay higher taxes to get them. Start your howling, the mood has changed and few are listening now. Someone had to come up with the courage to match the shopping list to the money needed, and Mayor John Tory turned out to be just that brave.

He wants tolls on the Gardiner Expressway and the Don Valley Parkway. Give him your support. We have more roads ahead.

You know Toronto has been sludging along, decrepit and inept. Our roads feel like corduroy, encounters with city staff end unhappily — if they even happen — after months of waiting, cyclists, cars and pedestrians are at war, city housing for the poor is rotting, we need to plant trees, we need to prepare for climate change, our air is filled with fumes, we need density rather than sprawl . . .

Many of these problems can be solved by the best unguent of all, money. To borrow from Clinique, in praise of its moisturizer “Moisture Surge Extended Thirst Relief,” taxation provides “a drink for a city, continually plumping its appearance with hydration. It improves flakiness and tightness, leaving a city looking and feeling happier and healthier — even through shifts in humidity. It immediately cools and refreshes . . . for a luminous glow.”

Shabby Toronto is definitely a city that could use a luminous glow. I can already see this winter’s waterstaining, I can feel the cigarette butts yearning for crusty snowbanks yet to come, five months of blackening guaranteed.

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There were alternatives, though perhaps politically impossible. An income tax would have been more fair. I do not see why an alcohol and cigarette tax is difficult for a city to implement, and in some ways, the higher cost of ciggies and beer makes an early death more elegant, easier on the throat and last remaining lung. I no longer object to contracting out east-end garbage collection mainly because I no longer object to anything that will allow tax revenue to be spent on other things.

And I still say property taxes should rise, even if it might create some hardship for fixed-pension homeowners — many of us now live on fixed salaries as well — because it creates a current revenue stream. That’s better than a land transfer tax after a house sale years down the road, a road by the way that doesn’t shovel and salt itself.

People may wish to stay in their homes forever, but the world has changed and prices have inflated, just like those blow-up carny Santas homeowners choose to plunk on the lawn to annoy us. We have to change, too. If you casually disregard time-of-use electricity pricing, you can afford higher property taxes.

Mayor Tory may have once mocked road tolls, but he wasn’t to know that climate change would create such severe flooding or tree damage or that retrofitting old buildings would become an emergency. Our infrastructure has cracks in it. We need a downtown relief line. It is not happening. It will have to happen.

Only cowardly politicians fail to stand up for taxation. The demonization of taxes has been neoliberalism’s greatest triumph. Now we are like Kansas. Automaton-like, we voted, Ford-like, against taxes, thereby voting against our own interests. Well, look at Kansas now.

And look at Toronto, city of private affluence and public squalor. The TTC fare hike was deplorable. Even The Beaverton’s suggestion of surge pricing — six times the regular fare during morning and evening rush hours — should be on the table.

Clever Beaverton. I thought its suggestion of an Uber service, allowing passengers to go “TTCBlack” and have the bus all to themselves, was workable for a few riders across the city. Think of that, maybe 20 or 25 happy TTC customers daily. It would be an improvement.

After all these decades, Toronto has a line and a loop. Other cities are so clogged with LRTs and subways that their transit maps look like knitting patterns. In Paris, you pretty much just climb downstairs anywhere. You’ll get to your destination eventually and you’ll enjoy doing it.

Quit showing off, Copenhagen. I’ll pretend I didn’t see you, Montreal. And Lisbon? Its metro system is so big, bright and pretty, you’d use it as a children’s playground if they weren’t already in school taking compassion lessons.

You see teams of blindfolded children stumbling through Lisbon’s tiled, hilly streets. It’s a class of sighted children learning what it feels like to be blind. Is that not nice? Their subway stations are like the Chihuly exhibition at the ROM, glorious and gaudy.

Clearly, envy of other more competent cities is firing my engines here. It’s the magic of taxation. But dour Toronto didn’t want to be all flashy and whatnot. Our moment passed.

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